Her alarm sounded at exactly 7am. Why they kept to the twenty-four-hour system still, no one had bothered to explain. It was probably just easier to keep up with the historical convention than try to change everything. She reached over to turn off the blaring alarm and as her hand smacked the button pain shot through it making her gasp. Her arm was asleep, and she massaged her muscles trying to coax blood back into the nerves. After a moment, it felt better even with the tingling sensation still lingering. She reached her arms up over her head, yawned widely and tensed all of the muscles in her back as she stretched out finally beginning to wake up. She considered what might happen if she just refused to get out of bed this time. Nothing good, she guessed. There were stories of people that had done exactly that, and the consequences were never nice. She didn’t know anyone personally who had refused, but the rumours were enough to make her think twice every morning.

Everyone in the facility was stuck here until such time as the people that were observing them decided it was time to allow them to have their freedom. It had been such a long time, some stories said that it had been forty years, others said a hundred, still others said multiple hundreds of years. Those were ridiculous of course, but the stories persisted. All she knew was that every day since the day she had been born, she had woken up well beneath the frozen ground of the Kola Peninsula. She had often wondered what the observers were looking for. She assumed she would never know, but it was still a fun way to pass the time guessing at all of the things they may have been seeing. How the rumours about hundreds of years had begun, she would never know since they had full records of everyone that had ever lived in the facility. Maybe people just wanted to believe.

It didn’t take her long to shower, brush her teeth, and get dressed. She was on her way to report in for work, casually walking down the long hallway out of the personnel quarters. Her room smelled like lavender, because she kept two small bags of it hanging up, one in her shower so that the heat and steam might cause a tea like effect and almost brew it into her, and the other by her bedside to help her sleep better. The hallways, though, always smelled sterile and bleached. It was good that things were clean, but it was still a smell to wrinkle your nose at. It had always felt like this whole place was both too small and too big. As though there was just never enough space to give her any real distance from people but also that there were never enough people to actually fill the facility. 

The hallways were stark metal with inset pot lighting giving off a blue-white light that she could never escape. It was always nice to get out of the hallways and in to one of the common rooms which all seemed to be more softly lit and had walls that were actually painted and not bare metal. She could always change the lighting colours, she worked in maintenance after all, but if no one else complained, it couldn’t be that bad and she didn’t want to just make a unilateral decision. Stopping in quickly to the cafeteria, she grabbed some fruit and an energy bar before heading off to work. She supposed if she had wanted to, getting a full proper meal would be doable, but she was never that hungry just after waking up and the smell of baking and frying just didn’t appetize her. Something about working in the hidden hallways that were never seen by most of the people here just kept her appetite suppressed. She always took a late lunch too, but by then was always starving. 

“Hey. Time to swap out?” She was asked as she entered the main maintenance office. There were six maintenance engineers assigned to the hidden hallways. Two teams of three working eight hours on and sixteen hours off every day but offset so that every four hours someone new was coming on shift. That kept things a little more alert since by the end of her shift, she was always getting too tired to truly be aware of everything. Not that there was ever much for her to be aware of beyond the constant beeping and blinking lights that never changed. This room was kind of like the common rooms too. She looked around it, actually trying to take in the space, only to find that the walls had been painted when they were built and were peeling or scuffed almost beyond recognition of whatever colour had been chosen back then.

“Yeah, go ahead and grab some food and take a break. I’ll see you again in twenty-four,” she replied to him. She was the youngest maintenance engineer and the only female one. But that had never bothered her. She had never seen or heard of it bothering the others either. The simulated daylight shining onto his back as he walked away from the maintenance tunnel entrance felt off to her. The blue white seemed a little too blue. Maybe she should recalibrate the system, she wondered idly. A full system recalibration would at least keep her mind focused on something other than routine tasks. 

Within the first few hours of her shift she had managed to check all of the blinking lights throughout the facility and not one of them blinked differently or showed a different colour. It was boring, but better boring than a complete panic. She remembered hearing from her great-grandparents that they had been some of the first to enter this facility. They had always spoken about how exciting this all was, but after so long it seemed to her to be a very boring thing. Family relations were all tracked of course, and everyone knew who they were related to. No one wanted to get together with their closest family. Or their distant family if they could help it.

She had been dozing a bit in the one chair left in the one small space the maintenance engineers had, called an office by some people and a closet by them, when an alarm sounded. She had never heard an alarm like that before and it startled her enough to nearly fall out of her chair. 

“What the hell?” She cried. She scrambled over to the console set into the wall of the closet and quickly began checking systems for where the alarm was going off for. With dread she checked the central life support system. There it was. A red banner across the top of the screen. A core system was malfunctioning and there had been no failover to the standby. Or to the second standby. Or the third. How could that happen, she wondered. We check these things three times a day and there was never an error. 

Quickly, she tried to force the standby system to online itself and take over the core tasks. It was only a few commands to run, but the panic was setting in and it took her a couple of attempts with typing in each command to spell it all correctly. She hit enter and waited for the system to begin to output the progress. Soon, the screen was cleared of all her typing and suddenly showed an error.

CLS-00101: Single system failure detected 

ERR-00010: No FORCE found. Failover of running systems not completed 

CLS-02001: WATER_MANAGEMENT is down on Primary Node 

CLS-04001: Secondary Node(s) not in READY state

“What the hell?” She repeated. She knew the commands to run for this issue, but she’d only ever run them in the test environment where it was all simulated and this was never an error she had encountered. Only a single system had failed. Why weren’t any of the secondaries up and running? She tried to remotely access the secondary system, but it refused to connect and just logged her off immediately. How was she supposed to fix any of this, she was a maintenance engineer, not a programmer.

She started to doubt herself. She was young and the newest engineer, what if she had messed up when she was recalibrating the lights? What if she had missed some light, some alert, somewhere and that was causing this? She could feel the panic rise in her like an eruption of heat. The fear began to take hold within her causing muscles to tense and her breathing to come in short, hurried gasps. The fear seemed to creep through her body and infect all of her organs. The unease manifested in the need to vomit, the bile clawing its way up her throat and into her heart. She knew she was a failure, that she had been lying since she had taken the job. She was a joke, an imposter, and a fraud not an engineer. Her body almost gave out and she could feel a collapse into the chair as imminent.

She tried to take a deep breath and failed. She tried again, clutching the armrests on the chair, this time her breath was a little deeper. She took a third, then a fourth, and a fifth. Her heart rate slowed a little, her breathing becoming less laboured. If she was a failure, she wasn’t going to be a complete failure. She thought about everything she had ever done, how much work it had all been. There was no way she would accept it was all for nothing.

“Shit,” she swore under her breath. She quickly locked the computer in the maintenance office and took off, running towards the central server room. She was passing people in the halls at a breakneck sprint. Everyone was looking at her with fear and confusion. A few of them even began to reach out to stop and question her about what was going on, but she brushed them off quickly and kept going. Finally, she skidded to a halt in front of the central server room. She tapped her badge against the reader and quickly slammed in her access code. Her heart was pounding in her chest and she could feel the blood flow to her head starting a headache. The alarm was doing her no favours.

     ERR-00500: System in FAILURE state 

     ERR-00501: Access override required 

“Who the hell has more access than me? I’m the Engineer on Duty!” She yelled in frustration. She tried again to access the room, but the same error displayed itself. She groaned loudly, almost screaming. Her headache was pounding more viciously. Was she really this lost? Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a different pass being tapped against the reader. Every engineer had a similar blue pass, but this one was different. This one was red with black checks on it. She looked from the card reader to the access panel and watched as a code was quickly entered and the system opened the door. She lifted her eyes to look at who had this strange access card. 

“Hello. You must be Mira. Come on, let’s get this back online,” the woman with the strange card said. Wordlessly, she followed this woman into the server room. This woman walked with confidence to the central terminal and began typing. This room was cold, almost frigid and full of humming and whirring servers pressed into a half dozen racks. The cabling looked like snakes going from one end of the room to another, the floor covered in boot prints. She had only been in here once before when she got her first orientation as an engineer. Mira could only watch and hope this woman knew what she was doing. It took a few minutes, but suddenly the alarms stopped blaring loudly, although the blinking red strobe lights kept flashing. 

“That’s better. We can actually think now without that racket,” the woman commented. Furrowing her brow, she continued, “Hmmm. I think I know what the problem is, but I need your help. I can override anything you do, but I can’t directly do anything to the system. We need to bring the secondary online, but it’s in a faulted state. Something went wrong in the initial online and it first has to come down again before we can failover. Can you go to the secondary server room and shut it all down cleanly? I can override your access from here.”

It was unusual that Mira didn’t know someone, but this woman was completely unfamiliar to her. And the fact that these seemed to be orders from her phrased as requests was even more unusual. After shaking her head from the disbelief and confusion, Mira replied.

“Sure, yeah. I can go do that, I guess. Once it’s done, do I-” she started to ask.

“Come back here? Yes, once the secondary is properly online,” the woman ordered. Mira took off at a run again before again tapping her badge on the reader and punching in her code. It worked this time, but she suspected the other woman had just overridden the errors again. This room looked almost identical to the first server room and she supposed it should, they were meant to be perfect failovers in case one didn’t work. She wanted to rush and get things working perfectly, but she knew that rushing might lead her to make mistakes and those might be worse than a system failure. Working diligently, she shutdown the failed secondary node before bringing all of the parts of the system online, very carefully ensuring that she was working with one part at a time. She checked the status and saw no faults on it. She logged out of the server and walked out of the room, ensuring the door shut behind her and was still fully secure. Having confirmed this, she sprinted back to the primary server room. She was getting tired of this sprinting across the entire facility so many times.

“Good, you’re back. Retry the failover of the whole system, this time using the FORCE command,” the woman ordered. Mira was taking huge breaths in and out, trying to calm her heart rate a little. She was definitely out of shape and this running was proving it. Stoically she resolved to go to the fitness room more than once a year. Her panic had also been melting away, she realized with a start. Taking orders was actually nice she found, it absolved her of some of the responsibility that weighed heavily on her young shoulders.

“How do you know I didn’t use that before?” Mira demanded. Her hands were sweaty from the running and the worry, but she wiped them on her pants trying to ignore the feeling. The beads of sweat kept forming on her forehead and she wiped them away spasmodically, desperate to calm and cool down. She wanted to be and look professional when here, in front of this person she felt like the lowest intern who knew nothing and needed their hand held through every task.

“All commands are recorded into a system-write, but all others read-only file so that anyone can see what was run. It’s for auditing anyone and everyone just in case. You can look back too, it’s just kept in plain text,” she replied with a slight smile. The smile irked Mira. She wasn’t incompetent, but this woman made her feel stupid. She knew that was unfair, clearly this person understood these systems a lot more deeply than she did, but embarrassment and jealousy are never easy to overcome. 

“Here, there’s time, the systems are going to be brought up with much time to spare. Try running the history command and scrolling through it. There, you see, that command shows everything you have typed. Not something you would know unless someone showed you though. Let’s go ahead and get things fixed,” she continued. There was nothing judgemental in her voice and her body language said she only wanted to help. Mira cooled her anger; this was not the time to be jealous or defensive. The slight smell of jasmine hit her nose, was this woman just drinking tea or did she always smell like that? It was a nice smell and she was unconsciously drifting away from the errors and failure of the systems and almost started daydreaming. Her eyes fell back into focus and she found herself standing in front of the terminal in the server room. She ran the same commands she had previously tried, but this time typing in FORCE at the end. It prompted her for her password again, confirming she really meant it. She did. 

“Okay, it needs an override from you,” Mira said, stepping aside to allow this woman to type in her own username and password. Mira watched the screen to see what username this woman would type in. SU_GOLD. What the hell did that mean? Mira’s username was her first initial and last name. Was this woman named G. Old? The woman wasn’t exactly young, but a username that mocked her for her age? That didn’t make any sense. Did it mean this woman had some special privileges that Mira didn’t know about? How was there some woman she didn’t know anything about and how was that woman so knowledgeable about the system, with so much access?

“There, it’s running the failover now. It’ll take some time, probably thirty minutes to complete all of the mechanical and systems switches to the secondary. Well done, Mira. Thank you,” the woman commented. Mira felt pride bloom in her chest, but also concern. How did this woman know her? 

“I’m really sorry, but who are you? And what is that username? And what kind of badge is that?” She asked. She just had to know more, her curiosity overwhelming. The woman laughed and a wider smile formed on her face. She leaned against one of the server rack supports and put her hands into her overcoat pockets. She looked so casual standing there as if this system failure had been nothing more than a minor annoyance and not a potentially catastrophic end to their lives. The woman shrugged her shoulders  a little and a small smile emerged onto her face, as if to forestall the asking of even more questions.

“My name is Adhira Khatri. I am the Systems Architect. Usually, I don’t leave my office because there is no need to, but when something fails it can be necessary to be onsite to fix it. The username I used, SU_GOLD, is a super user account that can provide override approval to actions. I don’t remember the last time I had to use it. As for the badge, it is kept in a safe until something like this happens. It is one of three override badges in the facility. The other two are held in safes controlled by the Facility Director and the Principal Researcher. Does that answer your questions?” She replied. She smiled again, her head tilted slightly both looking and sounding honest and sincere. The server room kept humming away and the lights never changed. The failovers were happening seamlessly around them and the calm that this woman, Adhira, was exuding was infectious. Mira was already feeling better about herself and about the facility. 

“But why have I never talked to you before? I thought I knew everyone in the facility,” she countered, not confirming the woman’s response.

“As I said, I usually don’t leave my office. It’s attached to my quarters and I don’t work with anyone directly so I can make my own hours. You know the regulations here in this facility. Everyone here is assigned a job when they come of age and graduate from school. You were assigned to be a Maintenance Engineer. I was originally assigned to be a Researcher. I am the third Systems Architect since the facility was sealed. A fourth will need to be selected soon and the position is never an assigned one. It is a competed position, meaning anyone may apply when the competition is posted and I think you would do well to apply,” she answered. She looked calmly at Mira who stared back concernedly. Her questions must have been flying across her face because this woman, Adhira, had a slight smile.

“It may surprise you, but the current Facility Director was once the Systems Architect. It is rare to hold multiple of the most senior positions, but it does happen. At the highest levels in this facility, all positions are competed, none are assigned. This ensures that multiple people may have a say in who is selected, rather than entrusting those most senior of roles to an automated decision process. As for the role of Systems Architect, I will need to teach you and coach you to do the job and that can take time. When I was offered the job, it took me almost four years to be anywhere near ready to perform all of the duties, but I didn’t come from a computers background. You do so it shouldn’t take you nearly so long. I don’t know when we’ll post the competition, but when we do,” she trailed off. This woman was the only person to do her job? And she wasn’t even assigned to a job? The only people she knew like that were the Facility Director and the Principal Researcher. Did that mean that she really was on par with the seniority of the two most important people here? If she had a pass that was identical to ones only they had, she must be. It was almost too much to consider. Mira knew that there was a secretive project going on underground and that the research the teams here were doing was only a part of it, but it still seemed like a problem that people didn’t talk about a Systems Architect.

What does a Systems Architect actually do? Mira wondered. Maybe she would apply for the position, but that would mean that the Maintenance team would be down an engineer and she didn’t want them to suffer. She desperately wanted to be trained by someone who was as good at their job as Adhira seemed to be. She never wanted to feel like a fraud again. Looking at Adhira again, who was still smiling and seemed to have an agreeable face, she felt good about this woman. She looked down, deep in thought. Perhaps there was more to this facility than just keeping it up and running. She had never considered what it was that the researchers even looked into, let alone how it might be affected by or affecting her. Today had been a strange day and an unnerving one giving her huge amounts of doubt, but glancing up at Adhira, she thought it might be a good one too.